Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

Another in the series of white ink on black paper drawings. I was thinking "space is black" and that it'd be good to draw something space-related in the notebook. So I figured I'd look at what images NASA had of astronauts on the moon. Well, it turns out that while space is quite black, most of the pictures didn't exactly fill the frame with space. So it becomes a white-suited astronaut on an off-white moon. But there are shadows, reflections and various other challenges.

This is one of the famous pictures of Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. I used the color picture from NASA, as well as a thresholded B&W version as references and kind of drew what I saw and didn't worry too much about being perfectly accurate. The arms are close but not in the exact position. And while I tried to copy some of the features of the lunar surface, I didn't feel like taking a day to do that, so I kind of "summarized" it a bit. I think it looks OK. I think the footprints on the ground came out nicely. The helmet and visor are descent. And yes, I even added the little plus signs at the end that were built into the camera. I ran this through a Gaussian blur filter in Photoshop to talk the edge off some of the textures. The original picture is here at NASA, and the full resolution version of my drawing is here.